The point seriously at issue in the notion of experience common to both
sides in the older controversy thus turns out to be the place of thought
or intelligence in experience. Does reason have a distinctive office? Is
there a characteristic order of relations contributed by it?
Experience, to return to our positive conception, is primarily what is
undergone in connexion with activities whose import lies in their
objective consequences--their bearing upon future experiences. Organic
functions deal with things as things in course, in operation, in a state
of affairs not yet given or completed. What is done with, what is just
"there," is of concern only in the potentialities which it may indicate.
As ended, as wholly given, it is of no account. But as a sign of what
may come, it becomes an indispensable factor in behavior dealing with
changes, the outcome of which is not yet determined.
The only power the organism possesses to control its own future depends
upon the way its present responses modify changes which are taking place
in its medium. A living being may be comparatively impotent, or
comparatively free. It is all a matter of the way in which its present
reactions to things influence the future reactions of things upon it.
Without regard to its wish or intent every act it performs makes some
difference in the environment. The change may be trivial as respects its
own career and fortune. But it may also be of incalculable importance;
it may import harm, destruction, or it may procure well-being.
Is it possible for a living being to increase its control of welfare and
success? Can it manage, in any degree, to assure its future? Or does the
amount of security depend wholly upon the accidents of the situation?
Can it learn? Can it gain ability to assure its future in the present?
These questions center attention upon the significance of reflective
intelligence in the process of experience. The extent of an agent's
capacity for inference, its power to use a given fact as a sign of
something not yet given, measures the extent of its ability
systematically to enlarge its control of the future.
A being which can use given and finished facts as signs of things to
come; which can take given things as evidences of absent things, can, in
that degree, forecast the future; it can form reasonable expectations.
It is capable of achieving ideas; it is possessed of intelligence. For
use of the given or finished to anticipate the consequence of processes
going on is precisely what is meant by "ideas," by "intelligence."
As we have already noted, the environment is rarely all of a kind in its
bearing upon organic welfare; its most whole-hearted support of
life-activities is precarious and temporary. Some environmental changes
are auspicious; others are menacing. The secret of success--that is, of
the greatest attainable success--is for the organic response to cast in
its lot with present auspicious changes to strengthen them and thus to
avert the consequences flowing from occurrences of ill-omen. Any
reaction is a venture; it involves risk. We always build better or worse
than we can foretell. But the organism's fateful intervention in the
course of events is blind, its choice is random, except as it can employ
what happens to it as a basis of inferring what is likely to happen
later. In the degree in which it can read future results in present
on-goings, its responsive choice, its partiality to this condition or
that, become intelligent. Its bias grows reasonable. It can
deliberately, intentionally, participate in the direction of the course
of affairs. Its foresight of different futures which result according as
this or that present factor predominates in the shaping of affairs
permits it to partake intelligently instead of blindly and fatally in
the consequences its reactions give rise to. Participate it must, and to
its own weal or woe. Inference, the use of what happens, to anticipate
what will--or at least may--happen, makes the difference between
directed and undirected participation. And this capacity for inferring
is precisely the same as that use of natural occurrences for the
discovery and determination of consequences--the formation of new
dynamic connexions--which constitutes knowledge.
The fact that thought is an intrinsic feature of experience is fatal to
the traditional empiricism which makes it an artificial by-product. But
for that same reason it is fatal to the historic rationalisms whose
justification was the secondary and retrospective position assigned to
thought by empirical philosophy. According to the particularism of the
latter, thought was inevitably only a bunching together of hard-and-fast
separate items; thinking was but the gathering together and tying of
items already completely given, or else an equally artificial untying--a
mechanical adding and subtracting of the given. It was but a cumulative
registration, a consolidated merger; generality was a matter of bulk,
not of quality. Thinking was therefore treated as lacking constructive
power; even its organizing capacity was but simulated, being in truth
but arbitrary pigeon-holing. Genuine projection of the novel,
deliberate variation and invention, are idle fictions in such a version
of experience. If there ever was creation, it all took place at a remote
period. Since then the world has only recited lessons.
The value of inventive construction is too precious to be disposed of in
this cavalier way. Its unceremonious denial afforded an opportunity to
assert that in addition to experience the subject has a ready-made
faculty of thought or reason which transcends experience. Rationalism
thus accepted the account of experience given by traditional empiricism,
and introduced reason as extra-empirical. There are still thinkers who
regard any empiricism as necessarily committed to a belief in a
cut-and-dried reliance upon disconnected precedents, and who hold that
all systematic organization of past experiences for new and constructive
purposes is alien to strict empiricism.
Rationalism never explained, however, how a reason extraneous to
experience could enter into helpful relation with concrete experiences.
By definition, reason and experience were antithetical, so that the
concern of reason was not the fruitful expansion and guidance of the
course of experience, but a realm of considerations too sublime to
touch, or be touched by, experience. Discreet rationalists confined
themselves to theology and allied branches of abtruse science, and to
mathematics. Rationalism would have been a doctrine reserved for
academic specialists and abstract formalists had it not assumed the task
of providing an apologetics for traditional morals and theology, thereby
getting into touch with actual human beliefs and concerns. It is
notorious that historic empiricism was strong in criticism and in
demolition of outworn beliefs, but weak for purposes of constructive
social direction. But we frequently overlook the fact that whenever
rationalism cut free from conservative apologetics, it was also simply
an instrumentality for pointing out inconsistencies and absurdities in
existing beliefs--a sphere in which it was immensely useful, as the
Enlightenment shows. Leibniz and Voltaire were contemporary rationalists
in more senses than one.[3]
The recognition that reflection is a genuine factor within experience
and an indispensable factor in that control of the world which secures a
prosperous and significant expansion of experience undermines historic
rationalism as assuredly as it abolishes the foundations of historic
empiricism. The bearing of a correct idea of the place and office of
reflection upon modern idealisms is less obvious, but no less certain.
One of the curiosities of orthodox empiricism is that its outstanding
speculative problem is the existence of an "external world." For in
accordance with the notion that experience is attached to a private
subject as its exclusive possession, a world like the one in which we
appear to live must be "external" to experience instead of being its
subject-matter. I call it a curiosity, for if anything seems adequately
grounded empirically it is the existence of a world which resists the
characteristic functions of the subject of experience; which goes its
way, in some respects, independently of these functions, and which
frustrates our hopes and intentions. Ignorance which is fatal;
disappointment; the need of adjusting means and ends to the course of
nature, would seem to be facts sufficiently characterizing empirical
situations as to render the existence of an external world indubitable.
That the description of experience was arrived at by forcing actual
empirical facts into conformity with dialectic developments from a
concept of a knower outside of the real world of nature is testified to
by the historic alliance of empiricism and idealism.[4] According to the
most logically consistent editions of orthodox empiricism, all that can
be experienced is the fleeting, the momentary, mental state. That alone
is absolutely and indubitably present; therefore, it alone is
cognitively certain. It alone is _knowledge_. The existence of the past
(and of the future), of a decently stable world and of other
selves--indeed, of one's own self--falls outside this datum of
experience. These can be arrived at only by inference which is
"ejective"--a name given to an alleged type of inference that jumps from
experience, as from a springboard, to something beyond experience.
I should not anticipate difficulty in showing that this doctrine is,
dialectically, a mass of inconsistencies. Avowedly it is a doctrine of
desperation, and as such it is cited here to show the desperate straits
to which ignoring empirical facts has reduced a doctrine of experience.
More positively instructive are the objective idealisms which have been
the offspring of the marriage between the "reason" of historic
rationalism and the alleged immediate psychical stuff of historic
empiricism. These idealisms have recognized the genuineness of
connexions and the impotency of "feeling." They have then identified
connexions with logical or rational connexions, and thus treated "the
real World" as a synthesis of sentient consciousness by means of a
rational self-consciousness introducing objectivity: stability and
universality of reference.
Here again, for present purposes, criticism is unnecessary. It suffices
to point out that the value of this theory is bound up with the
genuineness of the problem of which it purports to be a solution. If the
basic concept is a fiction, there is no call for the solution. The more
important point is to perceive how far the "thought" which figures in
objective idealism comes from meeting the empirical demands made upon
actual thought. Idealism is much less formal than historic rationalism.
It treats thought, or reason, as constitutive of experience by means of
uniting and constructive functions, not as just concerned with a realm
of eternal truths apart from experience. On such a view thought
certainly loses its abstractness and remoteness. But, unfortunately, in
thus gaining the whole world it loses its own self. A world already, in
its intrinsic structure, dominated by thought is not a world in which,
save by contradiction of premises, thinking has anything to do.
That the doctrine logically results in making change unreal and error
unaccountable are consequences of importance in the technique of
professional philosophy; in the denial of empirical fact which they
imply they seem to many a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the premises from
which they proceed. But, after all, such consequences are of only
professional import. What is serious, even sinister, is the implied
sophistication regarding the place and office of reflection in the
scheme of things. A doctrine which exalts thought in name while
ignoring its efficacy in fact (that is, its use in bettering life) is a
doctrine which cannot be entertained and taught without serious peril.
Those who are not concerned with professional philosophy but who are
solicitous for intelligence as a factor in the amelioration of actual
conditions can but look askance at any doctrine which holds that the
entire scheme of things is already, if we but acquire the knack of
looking at it aright, fixedly and completely rational. It is a striking
manifestation of the extent in which philosophies have been compensatory
in quality.[5] But the matter cannot be passed over as if it were simply
a question of not grudging a certain amount of consolation to one amid
the irretrievable evils of life. For as to these evils no one knows how
many are retrievable; and a philosophy which proclaims the ability of a
dialectic theory of knowledge to reveal the world as already and
eternally a self-luminous rational whole, contaminates the scope and use
of thought at its very spring. To substitute the otiose insight gained
by manipulation of a formula for the slow cooeperative work of a humanity
guided by reflective intelligence is more than a technical blunder of
speculative philosophers.
A practical crisis may throw the relationship of ideas to life into an
exaggerated Brocken-like spectral relief, where exaggeration renders
perceptible features not ordinarily noted. The use of force to secure
narrow because exclusive aims is no novelty in human affairs. The
deploying of all the intelligence at command in order to increase the
effectiveness of the force used is not so common, yet presents nothing
intrinsically remarkable. The identification of force--military,
economic, and administrative--with moral necessity and moral culture is,
however, a phenomenon not likely to exhibit itself on a wide scale
except where intelligence has already been suborned by an idealism which
identifies "the actual with the rational," and thus finds the measure of
reason in the brute event determined by superior force. If we are to
have a philosophy which will intervene between attachment to rule of
thumb muddling and devotion to a systematized subordination of
intelligence to preexistent ends, it can be found only in a philosophy
which finds the ultimate measure of intelligence in consideration of a
desirable future and in search for the means of bringing it
progressively into existence. When professed idealism turns out to be a
narrow pragmatism--narrow because taking for granted the finality of
ends determined by historic conditions--the time has arrived for a
pragmatism which shall be empirically idealistic, proclaiming the
essential connexion of intelligence with the unachieved future--with
possibilities involving a transfiguration.